Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8,698 out of 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    That this is the first film for director Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony for directing the stage version, may be compounding the problem. But frankly, if someone wanted to do a parody of a gay film like this, it's hard to imagine the sloganeering being much different.
  2. The Boy Downstairs
    As the film moves elegantly between past and present, Brooks proves a keen observer of behavior and the pitfalls of overthinking. Finding complex beauty in what would be merely obvious in a lesser work, her delightful feature taps into a rarely broached, generally female coming-of-age dilemma: the fear of losing yourself before you know who you are.
  3. The Rachel Divide
    The Rachel Divide never quite cracks Dolezal's facade (if it even is a facade). But Brownson does move beyond the "think-piece" take on a real person — while also questioning whether she should.
  4. J. Edgar
    J. Edgar is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?
  5. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The animation style mirrors the original, which is simple in an appealing way. It is particularly effective in the action sequences, which make the most of animation's ability to create a playful reality. But the multi-layered historical references designed to be adroitly wry are a trickier gambit.
  6. The Cartel
    A brisk, incisive and mind-boggling -- no other phrase will work -- exposé of his native New Jersey's public education system.
  7. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    Starts imploding long before the massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth is due to deliver annihilation.
  8. Alien 3
    Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.
  9. The Railway Man
    The Railway Man is an impressively crafted, skillfully acted, highly absorbing journey into a dark corner of world history.
  10. Pocahontas
    Directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, Pocahontas is on the formulaic side, a copy that duplicates what its predecessors have done, only a little less adroitly and with a little less style. [16Jun1995 Pg. F.01]
    • Los Angeles Times
  11. Extraordinary Tales
    Like "A Cat in Paris" or "Sita Sings the Blues," Extraordinary Tales reminds viewers that animation can enable an artist to realize an individual vision, even on a limited budget.
  12. Torn Hearts
    The dark twists and bloody mayhem of the film’s final third feel disappointingly abrupt and rote after all the thoughtful set-up, but the picture still mostly works, thanks to an energized cast, Croft’s sharp dialogue and Grant’s punchy style.
  13. Sing
    It's a cute movie with genuinely funny moments (keep an eye out for the koala car wash), and some great tunes to boot.
  14. Deja Vu
    What is interesting is not how little sense Déjà Vu makes but how little that matters. If you want your films to add up logically, you're welcome to take your calculator somewhere else. But if you do, you will be missing out on some first-class genre fun.
  15. Lizzie
    The respect for Lizzie means that film almost denies drama, rendering some moments almost inert. It could use an operatic high note, or even a truly deep dark night of the soul, some oscillation in the levels. But the film reflects the evenness with which Sevigny portrays the unflappable Lizzie.
  16. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    By the time this lightly entertaining look at life's emotional crises ends, even the characters you didn't think were sympathetic will have won you over.
  17. Loudmouth
    Loudmouth is better when it operates along parallel histories of strife and battle: galling incidents that expose America’s racial fault lines, and how Sharpton’s activism affected those spaces.
  18. Cocaine Cowboys
    In a sense it's a shame that Cocaine Cowboys is so obsessed by violence, because the film has interesting points to make.
  19. The Playroom
    The drama often feels posed and inert. Even so, it strikes more than a few chords as it digs deeper than period cliché.
  20. Heartbreaker
    Slick entertainment is rarely as, yes, slickly entertaining as it is in Heartbreaker, a French romantic farce that is commercial cinema at its most successful.
  21. The Lovebirds
    Rae and Nanjiani have a quicksilver chemistry, flashing from playful banter to genuine, hurtful arguing in an instant.
  22. Mr. Holland's Opus
    A film of epically hollow sentimentality, a movie that tells you how to feel every step of the way and ends on a symphony of false notes. The moment when we learn what Mr. Holland's Opus really means makes the ending of It's a Wonderful Life look like an exercise in restraint.
  23. On the Basis of Sex
    It would be silly to expect this movie to achieve the cinematic equivalent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliance, but you can’t help wishing it had more to offer than righteous speeches and stirring glances, that it put a few more ideas in your head to go with that lump in your throat.
  24. Beyond the Gates
    Beyond the Gates is more imaginative than frightening, and Stewart and co-writer Stephen Scarlata take too long to get to the good parts, killing time with long dialogue scenes where the characters pause interminably between lines.
  25. Run All Night
    Rife with familiar elements given something of a different spin, Run All Night manages to leave you out of breath but hungry for more.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Black Cauldron
    If you care about animation as an art form, it is impossible not to be thrilled by Disney's "The Black Cauldron." [27 July 1985, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  27. We Own the Night
    It's a bare-knuckled crime drama set in 1988 that stylistically could have been made that year and emphasizes Gray's strengths as a director while drawing attention to his limitations as a writer.
  28. I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
    And though the film also quotes Wiesenthal's exhortation "Hope lives when people remember," the filmmakers are most interested in drawing attention to what is happening now, primarily in Europe, and what it may mean for the future.
  29. Lakeboat
    Lakeboat requires its audiences to embrace it as lovingly as Mamet and Mantegna embrace its men, but it's a lot to ask.
  30. Langrishe Go Down
    Unearthing even the roughest gems serves a programming purpose, but in this case it has also led to a theatrical release of a movie that looks like a muddy second-generation Xerox and contains all the emotional and intellectual appeal of cold tea and soggy toast.
  31. Intact
    A sharp brainteaser of a film, a compelling mind game you compulsively play along with.
  32. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Myers has a singular talent for skit humor… You can get away with an awful lot of gross, juvenile humor if you've got that to fall back on. [11 June 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  33. Nico and Dani
    An exceptional coming-of-age film--subtle, humorous, compassionate, acutely perceptive.
  34. Signs
    Shyamalan's great gift is the creation of atmosphere, the conjuring of spooky, unseen menace. When he gets around to doing this in Signs, all is well, but it's a tossup as to whether the film offers enough of a payoff considering how long it takes to get where it's going.
  35. The Front Line
    Jang and screenwriter Park Sang-yeon recognize the situation's senselessness but can't resist ramping up the melodrama and celebrating the heroism of the battle-fatigued soldiers. These contradictory impulses, combined with the film's undercooked characters, make The Front Line a war movie not quite worth engaging.
  36. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Visual sumptuousness trumps the coldly erotic dastardliness of previous incarnations, but where this version feasts is on close-ups, with exchanges between pairs of eyes - the predatory versus the hesitant, the manipulatively comforting opposite the blindly vulnerable - that recall the silent era.
  37. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    As bad-taste splatter comedies go, "Dead Snow 2" is one of the more charitably nutty ones, less about gorging on gore than reveling in how silly the whole genre can be.
  38. Riot Girls
    Despite its audacious premise and style, Riot Girls feels at times underwritten, a few of the performances under-baked. Kwiatkowski and Iseman carry the film, but such a sprawling world is heavy lifting. Nevertheless, Vuckovic ably showcases her fetchingly energetic aesthetic.
  39. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Zellweger plays Bridget just as charmingly as she always has -- flawed but endearing; just right in her own idiosyncratic way.
  40. A Very British Gangster
    If Tony Soprano had a cheekier, less haunted, openly gay British counterpart, it would be Dominic Noonan, the Manchester crime boss profiled in the stylish and compelling A Very British Gangster.
  41. Suntan
    The story might have had some thematic heft if we knew or cared anything about the characters. But all we can glean about the disastrous Kostis is that he’s had hard times, while Anna is a total cipher.
  42. The Napa Boys
    Once you realize what the heck it is you’re watching, you might just settle in for a more diverting — or less terrible — time than first expected. But the lower your entertainment bar, the better.
  43. Elvis & Nixon
    Elvis & Nixon meanders its way into the big encounter with a tone too wacky and cutesy to whet our appetite for strangeness.
  44. Legally Blonde
    Guilty of squandering resources. Amusing as it goes about setting up its premise, in Witherspoon, the gifted veteran of "Election" and "Pleasantville," it has an actress willing to throw herself completely into the part to excellent effect.
  45. The Final Girls
    A playful deconstruction of the slasher film that ultimately packs a surprisingly affecting punch.
  46. The Pact
    Deftly mounted, shot and scored, The Pact is a master class in ensemble acting, led by Neumann in a visceral, deeply layered and knife‘s-edge turn.
  47. Cars 3
    This warmly sentimental G-rated film about facing new realities and recapturing lost dreams has, despite its relatively adult story line, a beguilingly effortless feeling to it, as if it had nothing to prove.
  48. Good Grief
    Good Grief ultimately promises more than its starter kit of rom-com elements and good intentions can deliver. But within that inviting aura are a number of pleasures, starting with Levy’s homo-neurotic appeal as a cynically romantic gay lead.
  49. Moonlight Mile
    What's on screen is too honest and from the heart to totally dismiss but too slick and contrived to completely embrace. This is a film that cares about genuine emotion but also wants to tame it, to tidy it up and keep it confined to quarters.
  50. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is a raucously funny, often endearing, subversively feminist, bloody good time.
  51. The Dead Lands
    The only aspects of the tale that seem uniquely Maori are the action sequences featuring the martial art of mau rakau. Aside from intermittent dream sequences in which Hongi communicates with his late grandmother (Rena Owen), the storytelling is Westernized.
  52. Savages
    Stone is also a director who has often felt that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and his weakness for bloody excesses of all sorts undermines much of his good work. You might not think that a motion picture called Savages could be too violent, too savage, but you would be wrong.
  53. Roll Bounce
    Has plenty of affectionate humor to balance some serious heart-tugging. And as for the roller-skating, it for sure provides a lot of razzle-dazzle action with lots of virtuoso terpsichorean touches.
  54. For a Woman
    There's storytelling vigor here and fine performances, plus some pointed exchanges about the burdens of cultural identity and emotional preservation in the aftermath of immense upheaval.
  55. Shot Caller
    It always feels like an exercise instead of an examination, a flow chart of bad decisions and explosive violence that may not glorify the poisonous nature of hard time but rarely skims below the surface of what it means to break bad.
  56. Lux Æterna
    Lux Aeterna, to its credit, is a pretty terrible commercial and an undeniably fascinating experiment.
  57. Good Madam
    The movie doesn’t shy away from magic spells and arcane African blood rituals, but the real dark mojo that Bass is bringing so starkly to the big screen involves the cycles and privilege and exclusion that seems to persist through every attempt at exorcism.
  58. Mission: Impossible
    Mission: Impossible proves something of a letdown, not just because it's fairly easy to guess who the bad guy is but also because we've hardly gotten to know anyone in the movie well enough to become more than superficially involved with them.
  59. Independence Day
    Cities engulfed by rolling walls of flame, sinister aquamarine power blasts turning beloved national monuments to toast, even the roiling clouds the spaceships appear out of, they are all disturbing, unsettling and completely convincing.
  60. Sliding Doors
    It may be Howitt's greatest achievement that we're able to keep the stories straight.
  61. Confidence
    Does have a large and capable cast and, in James Foley, a director with a taste for visual flourishes. They all so fell in love with the script by Doug Jung they didn't notice how much a derivative retread it is of superior material like "The Grifters" and even "The Sting."
  62. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    May ultimately be slight, but its appeal lies in its ability to find hope and strength in the soulful eyes of a gentle teenager.
  63. American Pimp
    The dehumanizing aspect of pimping is what's scariest about the Hughes brothers' investigation--so powerful the filmmakers realize they need only to record it.
  64. Jakob's Wife
    The themes of Jakob’s Wife are a bit simplistic, but the lead performances are incredibly complex, drawing on the two stars’ decades of screen (and life) experience.
  65. Dating Amber
    Not all of the ancillary characters and their stories are fully developed in the film’s quick 92 minutes, but Dating Amber convincingly channels the angst and awkwardness that can be a part of teenagers’ struggles with their identity.
  66. The Drama
    Ultimately, The Drama is the movie equivalent of a half-glass of Champagne: a toast Borgli trusts us to decide whether its ideas are half-empty or half-full. I’ll raise my cup to full, but only because of how pleasurably it bubbles.
  67. Dawn of the Dead
    Good zombie fun, the remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is the best proof in ages that cannibalizing old material sometimes works fiendishly well.
  68. Noriko's Dinner Table
    Through a barrage of fragmented images of lurid events, escalating hysteria and sheer madness, Sono holds up a cracked mirror to modern life, inspiring the viewer to think with unexpected seriousness about what it means to be a human being.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Best when exploring the nitty gritty of N'Dour's life as a musician, favorite son and cultural ambassador.
  70. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Though its early sections feel repetitive and self-congratulatory, the documentary's tension builds in the way director Mary Liz Thomson uses archival material, much of it from TV news.
  71. The Most Unknown
    With its gorgeous photography, charismatic participants and unabashed love for discovery, The Most Unknown feels like a science documentary cross-fertilized with that sentimental old Coke commercial — the smartest among us holding hands across the globe, charting our universe in happy harmony.
  72. Lost in America
    It digs deeply into youth homelessness, as well as its roots in the foster care system, LGBTQ discrimination and sex trafficking.
  73. My Darling Supermarket
    In this existentialist delight, whimsical and profound, the mundane gains new enlightenment.
  74. Drifting Home
    The deep strangeness of Drifting Home can take some time to adjust to. But in this quirky and boisterous picture, the surreal predicament is ultimately just an offshoot of these kids’ common fears about growing up.
  75. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    It's a fun, nostalgic, informative journey. Aided by vivid archival footage and photos, the movie charts the evolution of the song through the Holocaust, the birth of Israel and the modern Jewish Diaspora.
  76. The Forgiven
    While The Forgiven isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.
  77. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    When it comes to serving up diabolical horror with bold, sophisticated glee, Park, best known for "Oldboy," is right up there with Dario Argento, Guillermo del Toro and Takashi Miike.
  78. Limitless
    Smart isn't all it's cracked up to be and soon the movie is unraveling faster than all of Eddie's grand schemes.
  79. Running from Crazy
    At once short on details and incredibly forthcoming, Barbara Kopple's documentary doesn't dig into specifics about Mariel's personal struggles with mental illness nor the WillingWay lifestyle that she and her boyfriend Bobby Williams espouse.
  80. Jurassic World
    Despite the best efforts of director Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World's story of Indominus rex on the loose, while certainly acceptable, doesn't have the same impact as the initial film.
  81. Barney Thomson
    Despite the fertile concept, it's hard to care about, much less root for, the irritable, charisma-challenged Barney. The character never emerges as an effective hero or antihero, and performer Carlyle does little to mitigate that.
  82. Realive
    Unfortunately, the movie’s over-dependence on voice-over and its overwritten script interfere with the audience being able to fully engage.
  83. The Black Sea
    In a world increasingly obsessed with the notion of homelands and borders, it’s good to be reminded by a chill hang with an open-arms message that the world is strongest when we get to make our best lives anywhere we choose.
  84. Rubber
    If you meet the fiendishly deadpan Rubber halfway, its assured mix of cinephile artiness and grindhouse spoof will offer some oddball surprises.
  85. Junior
    Effective, but despite the trio's fine efforts Junior can't get past lightly amusing, never manages to work up a sustained comic head of steam.
  86. Michael Collins
    This is an extremely cinematic, beautifully made David Lean-type epic, helped by fluid and involving camera work by two-time Oscar-winning ("The Killing Fields," "The Mission") cinematographer Chris Menges.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Dead
    The Dead, evocatively filmed in grainy 35mm, might carry the cinematic vibe of an old-school, flesh-eating adventure, but as it should be with stories like this, it's not a pretty picture.
  88. Strike a Pose
    It’s a loving, honest portrait of these men who were world-famous for a bright moment, and most importantly, what happens after the limelight goes away.
  89. Kim's Video
    This caper-slash-personal essay is an admirable endeavor that honors, above all, a filmmaker’s fixation on a medium that makes him whole.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Naqoyqatsi
    Much of this is involving, although the pace is so relentless that it leaves little time to breathe or grasp precisely what Reggio is attempting to say.
  91. The Children of the Century
    In scope, ambition and accomplishment, Children of the Century therefore takes Kurys' career to a whole new level.
  92. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Pleasing blend of humor, sentiment and commentary.
  93. The Shape of Things
    Unfortunately, this film is not as convincing as LaBute's first feature ("In the Company of Men"), for it betrays its origins in the theatricality of its dialogue, resulting in an aura of artificiality.
  94. I, Robot
    More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production. Given the film's assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing.
  95. Valley of Love
    It's illuminating to see Huppert and Depardieu in a different mode, and Huppert brings a delicate physical and emotional fragility to her role. These two are fantastic, and they're fantastic together.
  96. A Banquet
    Muted and ambiguous — sometimes to a fault — “A Banquet” is well acted and well crafted and should resonate with viewers who have had experiences similar to those of the movie’s perpetually anxious mother.
  97. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    If the bad guys didn't reappear with welcome regularity, "Money Never Sleeps" would be even more of a snooze than it already is.
  98. Dalíland
    It’s easy to take for granted what’s good about Dalíland, namely Gala and Dalí as played by Sukowa and Kingsley. Sukowa’s depiction of a Russian woman with a taste for drama and the finer things in life is over the top, but deadly accurate; Kingsley balances imperiousness and vulnerability beautifully and with an ease only he seems capable of achieving.
  99. In Darkness
    The film is impressive as a star vehicle, if a bit rickety as an action picture.
  100. I Love My Dad
    Together, Morosini and Oswalt capture the panic that seizes some parents when they see their kids slipping into despair. They sensitively dramatize one father’s fear that everything he does to make things better will permanently ruin everything — though that doesn’t stop him from blundering ahead anyway.
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